Battle of Marais des Cygnes

The ground you are crossing has soaked up violence twice over. First came a massacre; then, six years later, a battle. Together they bookend the bloodiest chapter of the Kansas-Missouri border wars.

In May of eighteen fifty-eight, a proslavery guerrilla named Charles Hamilton rounded up eleven free-state settlers near the hamlet of Trading Post, a mile south of here. He marched them into a ravine along the Marais des Cygnes River and opened fire at close range. Five men died where they fell. Five more were wounded and survived by playing dead. One escaped. Hamilton and his riders fled back across the Missouri line before anyone could stop them. John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem about the atrocity within months. The graves became a pilgrimage site for abolitionists. John Brown built a log fort nearby and spent the summer daring Hamilton to return. Hamilton never did.

The Marais des Cygnes Massacre was the last mass killing of the Bleeding Kansas period. The Civil War, arriving three years later, dwarfed it in scale, but the memory of those men in the ravine had already hardened Kansas into an unyielding free state.

Then came October twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-four. General Sterling Price had launched a bold Confederate raid through Missouri, hoping to swing the state and undermine Lincoln's reelection. Union cavalry crushed him at the Battle of Westport two days earlier and chased him south. Here at the Marais des Cygnes crossing, Colonels Frederick Benteen and John Philips caught Price's rear guard protecting his supply wagons. The Union troopers charged before dawn, drove the Confederates across the river, and captured a hundred prisoners and two cannon. Price kept retreating, never to threaten the region again.

This wooded river valley looks peaceful today. The massacre site is preserved as a state historic park a short distance south. Together, the two events remind us that the Civil War in Kansas began years before Fort Sumter and ended only when the last Confederate wagon crossed back into Arkansas.